Monday, June 22, 2009

Review #33: How Are You Peeling

Dad: It's time for "How Are You Peeling..."Gracie (age 8): "...Foods With Moods."Dad: And the guys who made this book have great names: Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers.Isaac (age 10): It sounds like a "Juice" guy.Dad: What is the interesting thing about this book? How is this different from other books?Isaac: Vegetables!Gracie: This book is about a whole bunch of different moods.Isaac: And vegetables and fruits!Gracie: A "mood" is how you are feeling -- if you are feeling happy or feeling sad. And this whole book is told with food, because the guy that does the pictures goes to the store, buys a bunch of food, and carves in faces.Lily (age 6): He puts eyes on the food, and sometimes he carves mouths and noses. Actually, I bet he doesn't carve the noses. Then he takes pictures of them.Gracie: But sometimes he doesn't carve the food at all. Sometimes the faces are already there!Isaac: Mostly he tries to find weird looking fruits. Like this one... he really found an apple that looked like that.Gracie: It's an apple with a big hole in it, and the guy didn't carve it.Lily: He actually found that real dent in an apple. He was like, "Oh, that could be good -- I'm going to use it for my character!"Dad: And that's probably an apple most people would have skipped over. Most people would say, "Eww... I don't want that apple..." But he saw it and thought, "That's my book, baby! I take all the weirdies!"Kids: Ha ha ha ha ha!Isaac: Woah! Look at that one! It's a weirdie!Dad: Putting faces on food isn't a completely new idea. Can you think of a food that everybody already carves?Isaac: Tomatoes....pause followed by laughterDad: Who carves tomatoes?!Gracie: Pumpkins! Pumpkins!!Dad: There you go. Winner! We have a winner!Lily: People carve pumpkins for Halloween.Dad: But these guys thought, "Why not oranges?"Gracie: Why not strawberries?Lily: There's no pumpkins in this book at all.Isaac: They'd probably get a weirdie pumpkin or turn the stem into a nose.Dad: So when you illustrate a book, do you have to use pencils or paints?Isaac: No, you can take photographs.Gracie: You can do it with food!Isaac: I did something like this once! I used Gracie and Lily's dollhouse set, and I took my camera, and I zoomed in so that it looked like a real room, and I took a picture of it. Then I stuck a banana in the dollhouse, and I zoomed in the same way, and took another picture, and it made it look like a giant banana appeared in the room.Dad: Can you describe some of the pictures in this book?Isaac: Sometimes they have to combine three foods. The turtle has a seed for the eye, a pepper for the head, and a melon for the shell.Gracie: I like the little radish guys. There are these tiny, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, little radishes. And there's this giant yellow melon or something...Isaac: Squash.Gracie: ...this giant yellow squash, and the radishes are freaking him out. And the squash is, like, eleven times their size...Isaac: Nine times.Gracie: ...nine times their size. The radish is this teeny-tiny guy with an open mouth, screaming at the squash. And the radish has a pointy stick nose. Some of the other radishes have curvy noses... I love them!Isaac: Here's another one of those weirdies.Dad: Yeah, they hardly did anything to that pepper. All they did was add eyes. The natural folds make all the expression.Isaac: He was a weirdie.Gracie: He looks like one of those bulldogs.Isaac: There are tons of weirdies on this page!Dad: That one looks like baby Evie.Isaac: Oh, for the love...Lily: Look at tha-ha-ha-hat!Isaac: He has weird teeth. He looks evil.Dad: Who? The orange?Gracie: Do you think the guys that make the book eat the food afterward?Isaac: "Hello, I'm going to eat you, big teeth guy."Lily: I like this one - he's cute. He's a lemon. He doesn't have freaky teeth. I like the ones that don't have freaky teeth. But this one is sad. He's feeling very sad.Dad: You like the sad ones?Lily: No. I like the ones that don't have freaky teeth. I like to eat lemons too. They are sour and good! But I haven't had one for ages.Isaac: I saw in a magazine how he makes these pictures. That would be fun to do. For this review, we could go to the grocery store...Dad: That IS what we're going to do.Isaac: It is!?!Dad: Yep!Isaac: I want to find a piece of food, a vegetable, that looks weird. I want to get a weirdie vegetable.Gracie: I am going to find the weirdie-est one of all!Lily: Me too! I'm going to find the second weirdie-est one of all.Gracie: I want to eeeeeeeat something.Dad: Did that book make you hungry?Gracie: Now I want to eat a kiwi. I want to eat that kiwi. The one that's going, "Aaaaaghhhhh!"

pear bird & melon guy, by Lily

lemon man & potato seal, by Gracie

beet creature & pear mouse, by Isaac

I have to say, the whole process of shopping for these foods and bringing them to life was a blast! Here's one last group shot:

The kids also had fun eating them when we were all done. Here are some funny picts I got when little brother Elijah started digging in:

Amazing-- you guys are all so very creative, and I'll bet you had a blast finding these weirdies! :) Thanks so much for sharing these- I'd bet the authors (the ones with the wacky names!) would love to see these!

I knew I'd love your review of this book (another one of my personal favourites). I love what you kids hve done with the fruits and vegetables.

I want to try this with my little girl now and maybe it would be a good activity to do with the preschool children that I work with... Although, we'll have to choose soft fruits that we can use plastic knives with.

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We love the written word. We love art. Children's books are a place where those two things come together beautifully. Here at Bookie Woogie we pick our favorite books, review them, and create some accompanying fan art. We invite you to participate too: please chime in with your thoughts and comments!